Damsel in distress

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... A bad gunslinger called Salty Sam was chasin' poor Sweet Sue
He trapped her in the old sawmill and said with an evil laugh,
If you don't give me the deed to your ranch
I'll saw you all in half!
And then he grabbed her (and then)
He tied her up (and then)
He turned on the bandsaw (and then, and then...!) ...
—Along Came Jones, by The Coasters

The damsel in distress is a popular stock character, perhaps in large measure because her predicaments almost always contain hints of BDSM fantasy. The helplessness of these damsels, who are almost always foolish and ineffectual to the point of naïvete, along with their need for male heroes to rescue them, have also made the stereotype the target of feminist criticism.

Damsels in distress are not used nearly as often as they were previously, and current depictions of the stock character usually play the role as camp, although video games still feature the occasional old-style damsel. The stock character did undergo a revival of sorts in Halloween, Friday the 13th, and other slasher films of the 1980s. Here, though, the stock character was played with a twist: there were several young women characters, most of whom were killed by the serial killer villain, but one survived to defeat him. The young woman survivor herself became a stock character, the Final Girl, embodied in characters such as Ellen Ripley in the Alien series. Sarah Connor, a damsel in distress in The Terminator, became the effective survivor type in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Damsel in Distress is the title of a book by P. G. Wodehouse and a motion picture that starred Fred Astaire.

Contents

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Notable damsels in distress

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Legends, fairy tales and fiction

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Novels

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Movies

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Animation

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Comics

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Video games

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See also

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